Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart

Many years ago I was briefly part of a university group trying to get better working conditions for grad students, post-docs, adjuncts, and other members of academia’s petite bourgeoisie. (And yes, we were the sort of people who used terms like “petite bourgeoisie” to show each other how clever we were.) One Tuesday evening an older gentleman showed up to one of our meetings. He listened patiently as we talked, then cleared his throat and said, “You know, there’s probably an easier way to do this. If you can get a meeting with the dean, he might—”

“We’ve already tried talking to dean,” someone said dismissively.

The guy nodded. “I understand that, but I think that if you say you want to talk about retention rather than—”

“The problem isn’t just retaining people,” someone else immediately said, “We need to broaden the intake.”

I think he tried to speak one more time, only to be cut off in the same way. As we all went in circles saying, “Well actually, the real problem is…” he quietly got up and went to the blackboard. (We were meeting in an empty classroom, and yes, it was long enough ago that they still had blackboards.) None of us noticed that he was writing, but when the door closed behind him a few moments later, we all saw the message he’d left behind:

You have just cut me off mid-sentence three times in less than a minute. Based on that, I don’t think a future built by you will be better than what we have today.

We dismissed it, of course—I mean, hell, he’d been wearing a tie. But I found out later that he was the first openly gay man to hold an administrative position at that university, and that he’d worked for over twenty years to make admissions and promotions fairer. Unfortunately, I learned that from his obituary notice. I still wonder what I could have learned from him if I’d been less concerned about impressing people with how smart I was and more willing to listen.

Thirty years later, a billionaire named Marc Andreessen published a manifesto with the intellectual depth and writing style of something a freshman would throw together in a caffeine-fueled frenzy after binging on right-wing podcast [Andreessen2023]. Andreessen’s manifesto attacked anyone who thought technology should be regulated, that its risks should be weighed against its benefits, or that workers and communities affected by technological change should have a say in it. Among the heroes he cited was F.T. Marinetti, the Italian futurist who wrote in 1909 that war is “the world’s only hygiene” and that civilization should be cleansed of feminism, democracy, and weakness. Marinetti’s work inspired Benito Mussolini, the founder of Fascism; Andreessen is one of the most powerful venture capitalists in the world, and is one of a growing number of big tech billionaires who believe they can dispense with the people and the society that made their success possible.

Andreessen’s manifesto is part of why I’m writing these essays. His views are repugnant, and I’m offended by how shallow and superficial his thinking is, but the real reason is that most people in tech don’t know enough about how the world actually works to have an immune response to his self-serving bullshit. I studied engineering as an undergraduate and then became a programmer; during and after my degrees, I made more than my share of disparaging jokes about fluffy disciplines like politics, sociology, and philosophy. It took me a long time to admit that these are just as rigorous as math and physics, and that most of my strongly-held beliefs were just the opening moves in a chess game that others had been playing for centuries. These essays are, in a way, an extended apology to some of the people I sneered at (but only some, because many were just as pretentious as I was).

Another reason I’m writing this is that I am sixty-three years old. People my age run countries and make life-and-death decisions that affect millions of people. As unbelievable as it seems to me, somehow we are the grownups. In another few years, though, we’ll be retired and you will be in charge. I’d like you to be readier than I was, and I don’t think more lessons about the Unix shell or version control are going to help.

But I don’t want you to understand the world just so that I can sleep at night. I want you to understand is so that you can make it better, because that’s the greatest adventure of all time. In the year I was born most of the world’s people suffered under totalitarian rule, judges could and did order electroshock therapy to “cure” homosexuals, people could legally be denied jobs because of their skin color, and women couldn’t open bank accounts without their husband’s permission. Yes, a lot of things are bad and/or getting worse, but look at how far we’ve come. Look at how many more choices you have than your grandparents did. Look at how many more things you can know, and be, and enjoy. And most importantly, look at how many other people can too.

That didn’t happen by chance. Every time you buy one brand of running shoe rather than another or take a minutes to vote you are choosing one future over another. Every time you help someone do something they couldn’t do before, you are giving them more more control over their own life. The world doesn’t get better on its own. It gets better because we make it better: penny by penny, vote by vote, and one lesson at a time.

The climate crisis, mass extinction, surveillance capitalism, inequality on a scale we haven’t seen in a century, the re-emergence of racist nationalism: my generation could have prevented it, but decided that quarterly earnings were more important. The bills for our cowardice, lethargy, and greed are now coming due; as they do, we have left you no easy solutions to these problems.

That doesn’t mean there are no solutions at all, though. The essays that follow will explore a few things I wish I had known earlier: where power comes from, how it is used, how its use is hidden, and how people have held the powerful accountable and made the world a fairer place. I’m not going to try to be comprehensive or even-handed, but I hope you’ll find it informative, entertaining, and inspiring.

This is part of Version 2 of this material. See the whole series or the bibliography, or email me with feedback.